Being that the pope is speaking at this moment to the UN it is timely to discuss famine and 3rd world countries. I am 56 and have wondered my entire life how in the world can a few sustain so many. I keep seeing more farmland be turned into housing, or worse yet not cultivated at all, and wonder how the math is adding up here. I have absolutely no problem giving aid to countries that have a dire circumstance that is unique or short-lived, but to just keep giving aid to sustain people without serious intervention seems cruel. The land must support the population otherwise it is a false foundation. We must learn to accept human limitations and we must accept a realistic viewpoint. I am a animal lover. It pains me greatly to see large herds of horses picking away on a few blades of grass knowing that field is incapable of supporting that herd during the growing season. There is no quality of life for those animals. I want to rescue all of them but I can't. When I see famine conditions that have huge populations of people depending on food being dropped, I feel equally sadden and want to rescue all those people, but I can't. How utterly unfair. The problem is so much bigger than any solution.

Congratulations for an apt title for the article. Amartya Sen has rightly said that famines do not happen in democracies but while articulating this he missed the words 'economic and social'. There can be democracies where people enjoy the rights of electing their representatives for governance but at the same time the social and economic autocracies or dictatorships continues. India is the perfect case for this phenomenon. There are over 20 million water pumps for irrigation purposes in India where 80% of the population earns only half a US$ a day. This kind of discriminatory inequality can never form a real democracy. The economic order based on crude capitalism also does not allow real democracy where wealth and consumptions are also democratized. Such economic orders can only create islands of effluence in the seas of impoverishments and marginalization. These isolated or coordinated islands will cause tsunamis whether silent or loud. Such capitalistic economic advancements and accumulation of wealths has destroyed the economy of the people and its basic source, the nature. All the biggest agricultural producer countries are facing the threat of groundwater depletion, soil erosion and destruction of soil productivity and most importantly the land-nature-agriculture symbiotic inter-relationships. Now the time of results has come and a green famine is there to stay. It is essential to analyze the situation with true heart and mind and accept the realities that the so-called democracies, till now, has manipulated the economies in the favour of rich, white, men, and the upper caste people staying in plains. It is also essentially needed to democratize the wealth and opportunities to earn dignified livelihoods.

Read how the US are distorting agriculture and paying people to replace farmland with housing.http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04112008/transcript2.htmlChina has just banned exports of fertiliser, this is likely to have huge consequences a bit further down the line.Agree with my.opinion below, we cannot continue to expand the population. The carrying capacity of this planet is probably around 3 billion at max. and as we reach the end of the Oil Age we are no longer going to have cheap abundant energy to prop us up. Since none of our so called "leaders" are facing up to this coming crash, brace, brace.

It is unfortunate that the US Federal Reserve has chosen to pursue an inflationary policy. Oil in particular is priced in dollars, resulting in higher than necessary energy costs. Cost push inflation is pushing it's way through everything including food. Speculation in food seems a safer bet than dollar denominated assets. Furthermore, the US Congress should immediately end its Ethanol support scheme. Of course that means that the 'do nothing' Congress would need to get off its hands and do something, which is highly unlikely.Reluctance to accept GM food, by the way, is NOT superstitious. It is completely rational. Like so much in the world today, GM food is just another 'get rich quick' scheme to benefit biotech corporations, through the skillful use of dodgy science. What needs to happen is the recognition that food production is important! Currently, it is far down the list, somewhere after new sub-divisions that now occupy formerly productive farm land. Four bedrooms 3 baths, 1.5 kitchens, den, playroom, etc etc etc, as it turns out are not more important after all - as very few can afford to pay for them or heat them.The whole 'greed thing' really needs to stop - which means we need intelligent people in government that can stand up to this foolishness to stop it. Where are those intelligent people currently employed? Hedge funds.

It does not make sense to watch population growth in areas where survival is only possible through food aid. Nature lets species wither if the environment does not support them. Are human beings not part of nature?

Commodity Exchanges should play constructive role of stabilising the food prices rather than causing raise in prices through speculation. Hope Governments will regulate commodity exchanges to play a constructive role rather than destructive role.

I talk to people every single day about this crisis and nobody cares. I have farmland that is being farmed and so I am closer to the issue. Many people today are so far removed from rural life they don't even know how corn is grown. They have no idea how much water is used to support this product. They have no idea how many chemicals are used and how much fuel it takes to harvest corn and then store only to move it again. I live in an area that mostly grows corn but has a very sandy soil and thus requires irrigation. During the summer one can see for miles those systems at work. Oh, have I mentioned that I own a restaurant and have seen our food prices shoot up every single week. Our dairy bill has tripled - some being increased business but a lot of that increase is just rising costs of all dairy products. Correct me if I am wrong, but anybody with an ounce of sense would realize that if corn is grown for human consumption, animal feed and and now for fuel that corn will be competing for feed or fuel even if corn production is increased. The price of corn can only go higher and also not be able to meet demand. We aren't even considering crop rotation, blights, or seasonally dry years with low yields. Our elected officials in Washington should all be fired, or better yet maybe send them back to school to learn how to add and subtract. It is my understanding that ethanol production is not profitable without government providing subsidies. It is also my understanding that more ethanol production will be brought on-line this year thus putting more pressure on corn production. I am remembering that Al Gore once said that when ethanol almost didn't happen he saved ethanol. Now does he look wise?

Strange, to me, that the Economist does not mention population as a problem even for countries such as Bangladesh. Why do you think there are all those 'landless laborers?

If it were even possible to implement a perfect agricultural system across the globe, at some point, population pressure would overwhelm it. Money too is not an inexhaustable resource.
In fact increasing food aid to the poorest nations today only impoverishes the poor in more affluent nations. It is time to end food aid where the problem is not a one off event but a chronic problem created by the indigenous people.

According to John Robbin's in his 'May All Be Fed', it takes .75 acres to feed an omnivore but only .5 acres to feed a vegetarian. A given amound of land can feed more than six times as many people eating a vegetarian diet than those eating a meat-based diet. The solution to many of our modern crises - environmental, food security, health (ours and the animals we torture before eating), is going veg.

Companies like Boeing and Intel used to be glamorous for the stock market. But food riots and the prospect of more severe upheavals are taking the glamour out of jets and processors and making us go back to basics for equilibrium.

Years ago, on my travels outside Canada, people used to tell me that places like Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta were dull. And in some ways they are dull. But Manitoba has grain and copper; Saskatchewan has potash for fertilizer, grain, oilseeds such as canola, uranium, oil, potash, grain and diamonds; Alberta has grain, ranching, oil (including the “oil sands”) and natural gas. All three of these Prairie Provinces also have, surprisingly, forestry!

We are not glamorous. The hockey playoffs keep us at home in front of our televisions in April. But we Canadians know how blessed we are. We also know that our ability to reliably produce this food, fertilizer and other resources is even more important now than usual.

This current environment suggests that the new “equilibrium” stocks to replace the glamour stocks could include Potash Corporation, Agrium, Viterra, HudBay Mining, Cameco and Canadian Oil Sands. These companies don’t advertise. Their head offices are in Calgary, Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Regina, not New York. But they are just as professional as Boeing and Intel and they can help bring us back to equilibrium

As an associate member of the Club of Rome, I once did a search on The Economist's pages to find out its views concerning the CoR.As it turned out, The Economist dismissed all views of "limits to growth" as irrational scaremongering. Don't think "2008". Think "XXI century". Scenario #2 of "Limits to Growth" clearly displays the following, all happening and bound to increase in the century:(i) Gigantic world productivity growth(ii) Gigantic world pollution levels (i.e., global warming, acid rain, etc)(iii) Raise in food prices(iv) Oil and other commodities production lowering; prices risingAmong many other variables.Dennis Meadows says we have crossed the threshold of human footprint. Perhaps it's high time for The Economist to stop dismissing LtG and to take a longer-term look at our century, for interesting times lie in store.

A quick history lesson on Ethanol. Although it is oversold to Americans as a way to reduce foreign oil dependance, it didn't start from there. Remember lead in gasoline? Ever wonder what "unleaded" gasoline is about? It means that ethanol took the place of lead as a way to improve air quality. From there it was an easy step to up the % of ethanol as a way to reduce oil imports. I agree with the comments about the electoral effect of Iowa. And I also agree that the Bush ethanol subsidies (passed with huge support from Democrats - including Hillary and Obama) are uneconomical, anti-green and just plain immoral. But our ethanol curse began with the insistence of environmentalists - not with GW Bush. If we want to rid ourselves of Ethanol (and enormous taxpayer subsidies to corporate farmers), we'll first need to reform our insane system of letting Iowa and NH decide who the president is going to be.

It is not only America. The European Union should finally put an end to its most controversial policy which dates back to the post-war years. I mean the Common Agricultural Policy which takes up about 40% of the whole EU budget. A glimpse of light is President Sarkozy's commitment to hold debates on a major reform on CAP during the French presidency of the Union - the second half of this year.

The food crisis is the most obvious of a range of crises which are either here or about to hit the world. Other crises which impact on food availability are climate change and peak oil
As oil supply world wide is likely to decline from this year or next, it wil become progressively more difficult to produce food, to process it and to distribute it. Our present system requires large amounts of oil for fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, transport etc. This will lead to even higher prices and more difficulties for poorer peoples.
The only solution to this is to encourage a rapid expansion of low impact (ie organic or extensive) local food production and processing, to reduce our oil addiction and thus be able to manage the end of the oil age without mass famine.

US politicians are going to have blood on their hands very soon if they don't immediately freeze corn to ethanol subsidies.What is needed in this election year is bi partisan consensus on how to go about this.
Otherwise this is how this will play outprices rise globally big developing countries India ,China and others spend billions to build large buffer stocks driving prices through the roof and in their wake ruining emerging economies in Africa and places like Pakistan and Afghanistan creating angst and instability the likes of which the world hasn't seen.

What is needed is:
1. End all subsidies to corn based ethanol (Don't ban it just don't spend billions of taxpayers money on something you could easily import from Brazil)
2.Increase productivity of farms in emerging markets to close to those levels in developed countries this itself will massively increase food supply.

Let us not forget the world unsustainable use of water, combined with a warming world. Getting bad farm regulations is only a temporary fix. We need to move at mass speed towards building a susainable world.

The present crisis is a warning of worse thing to come. This has the potential to exasperate civil strife, terrorism and wars so much so that it could truly threaten world stability. World governments, rich and poor, must pay this problem the attention it deserves. Priority number one!

All other issues pale in comparison. Before this food shortage gathers momentum it must be addressed. Short term remedies must be implemented along with long term, sustainable policies. Liberalize, educate, conserve, sacrifice, consult, cooperate and assist should be the mantra practiced by all. I think we all agree that we waste too much on subsidies, protectionism and conflict.